CUNY DIGITAL HISTORY ARCHIVE

This 1986 summary by the director of the Center for the Study of Women and Society (CSWS), Dr. Sue Rosenberg Zalk, provided a summary of the Community College Gender-Balancing Curriculum Project, an effort to expand Women's Studies at the undergraduate level as a result of a grant from the Ford Foundation. Dr. Zalk identified a need to include and consider race, ethnicity, and class when studying gender as an essential part of the project. The Advisory Board of the project, which consisted of one representative from each of the participating City University of New York (CUNY) community colleges, agreed that a guide for incorporating Women's Studies into introductory courses would be the project's final product, directed at community colleges and distributed to all teaching staff. The project was completed in two phases. The first phase involved assessing the status of Women's Studies at the different community colleges, which proved difficult since there was such a variety of material depending on the faculty member teaching the course. This same diversity helped reshape the project to focus on developing themes that could apply to various disciplines instead of specific courses. Specifically, the Advisory Board chose to focus on women, work, and family in relation to race, class, and ethnicity. The guide would include suggested essential readings for faculty and students, a summary of the key ideas, discussion, and essay questions, and issues regarding discipline, content, and methodology for anthropology, psychology, sociology, history, economy, and literature.